A look into security – Coming to a P2P network near you: your medical records

A team of Canadian medical researchers have inadvertently provided a very clear picture of the current state of the security risks posed by P2P networks. The authors intended to determine whether P2P clients were exposing personal health information, but their approach—downloading all files from a set of common document formats—provided them a clear picture of just what’s being made available on Gnutella and eDonkey: personal identification, health, and medical information, and a healthy collection of trojans.